ADATA DashDrive Elite HE720 review - Installation and RW File Copy tests

Installation

Nothing is required other than the fact that you need a working USB 3.0 host, just pop in the storage unit and Windows 7 will initialize and detect the drive like seen under portable devices.

We'll take a trawl around our most popular SSD slash storage benchmarks. Please do not compare a USB Flash drive to SSD results okay? It's a completely different thing with completely other usage. Small file transfers aren't the kind of scenario you’ll regularly meet under real-world usage; by any standards.

Performance RW File Copy tests

In this round of benchmarks we start off with two new additions in our test suite, real-world file copy tests. Currently certain controllers benefit from compressed files, while others don't. Certain storage units hate small files, others work well with it. So it only makes sense to do some manual tests on that.

File copy write test  - Slightly larger compressed files.

For this real-world file-copy test we take compressed data, like small JPG and MP3 files. We have them in random sizes from less than one KB up-to slightly larger 2MB files to emulate MP3 copying better (which most of you can relate to a notch better).

So we know that once we pass 16/32KB sizes, flash storage really hauls ass and speed up exponentially, below it however performance will remain limited.

For this test, initially designed to stress the fastest SSDs we increased the workload here towards 3 GB with 4272 compressed files in total, with a maximum files-size of 2MB. So we drop a little over 4300 small files onto the the drive, copied from the RAMDISK and measure the amount in seconds it takes for the storage unit to deal with it.

Again, the files are being copied from the RAMDISK in the amount of seconds you see above towards the tested storage unit, lower is obviously better. The results were disappointing, and it has everything to do with the mix of small files within the array of files used for this test. Flash storage USB drives suck at these small files.

This test is not what portable storage is about as these are all small files queued up to write. Let's take a more realistic approach.

As you can see the sequential write performance of the storage unit is not very good for a USB 3.0 device. We averaged out at 13 MB/sec. Fine for MP3 files and photo's.

Once we copy back the stored information towards a SATA3 SSD we can see where the storage unit shines, read performance easily topped 85 Mb/sec. But let's try and confirm all this with some synthetic benchmarks.

Things change when you'd copy massibe ISO files or stuff like that. Over 100MB/sec on writes .. nice.